Author: Stephen Coles

Welcome to our second installment of highlights from the Archive’s collection through the lens of social media. Joining our earlier post, these are some of the most loved and shared images from the last year or so.

In her recent update, librarian Kate Long mentioned the ways we use the Archive as a teaching tool, especially in our Survey of Type History for the MFA Design program at the California College of the Arts. Now in its third year, the course tells the story of design firsthand through a curated selection of artifacts from our collection. This year, of course, the pandemic is forcing us to meet remotely, which means we’re prioritizing key historical objects for digitization and virtual presentation. The beauty of this pivot is that everyone benefits – even those who aren’t master’s students – because the Online Archive is open to all. As a taste, here are a few recent additions to the site that represent typographic milestones over the first 150 years of letterpress printing.

Last fall, when we introduced Tables, a tool for creating sets of typographic artifacts from our Online Archive, we asked a few friends, board members, and staff to put the tool to use. The results demonstrate the myriad ways members can use Tables to build collections of inspiration, research, and resources for use in the studio or classroom.

The Letterform Lecture series complements Type West, our postgraduate certificate program in type design. In normal times we gather at the San Francisco Public Library where the talks are free and open to the public, but the series went online this spring in response to the pandemic. While we miss seeing you in person, the new format gives us a chance to reach our global audience in real time. Thanks to support from Adobe Fonts, recordings of these lectures are available to all within a few days after the event. As 2020 comes to a close we found it a good time to remember all the excellent talks from the year and give you quick access to those you missed.

Despite pandemic restrictions, the Archive’s Collections Team is actively (and safely) making our new space feel like home.

As you may have heard, we moved to a new space in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood in September. Like a lot of things this year, it didn’t come easy, but it feels like a fresh start. At our original location in Potrero Hill, we were just plain out of room — for desks, for books, for collections care projects. Despite turning every corner and closet available into bookcases, our shelves were overflowing. We had to keep incoming collections in boxes after processing them, because we didn’t have a linear inch to spare.

As the second industrial revolution hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, leaps in electrification, manufacturing, and transportation led to rapid changes in Western economies and societies. Advancements in paper making, printing, and typographic technologies followed suit, resulting in cheaper and more plentiful books, new forms of advertising to meet the demands of expanding commerce, and a burst of color and special effects that were previously impossible or too costly to produce. Meanwhile, as populations became vastly more urbanized, artists and printers waxed poetic about country life, incorporating the natural world into their work.

The latest batch of items in the Online Archive represents several dozen highlights from this era in our collection, including work by Will Bradley and Alphonse Mucha, sign painter portfolios from France, early type foundry ephemera, and a remarkable English catalog of wood type.

In April we launched the Online Archive to the public and promised exclusive features for Letterform Archive members in the future. That day has arrived with the beta release of Tables.